Remnant — Issue No. 1
Abandoned houses in Japan and Portugal, from $5k akiyas to stone ruins. Plus relocation grants and visa pathways worth investigating this week.
Hi! We're Wally and Malia, and this is the very first issue of Remnant, so let's do introductions.
We're writers with kids living in Los Angeles, which is a wonderful place to be if you have some sort of arrangement with the underworld gods of riches and plunder. We have not. So we do the thing. You know the thing. It is late, you have checked your bank balance recently, and you open a tab and type "cheap houses Japan" into the search bar. Two hours later you are forty listings deep, you have learned the word "akiya," and you are running the math on a stone farmhouse in Portugal that costs less than a year of rent.
We have done the thing more times than we can count. So we decided to make it a newsletter.
Here's the deal. Every week we send you property listings from places that genuinely want people to move in and fix them up. A surprising number of countries will straight-up pay you to do this. We source the listings from across the globe, we look into the area, we tell you a little about what seems great and what seems like it is going to be a problem, and you get to decide whether this is a fun fantasy or an actual plan.
A note on the name: a remnant is something left behind. In the textile sense, it's a piece of cloth too small for the bolt but still useful, good, even perhaps uniquely special. Remnant Guide seeks out those one of a kind pieces (properties) and teases out a few threads. Pull on them if you dare.
This week we are perusing Japan and Portugal. We have the empty houses of Shikoku and Tohoku, some stone houses in the middle of Portugal, two featured properties, a few extras, some practical details, and a lifestyle section at the bottom with snacks, reading, and a look at our own group chat.
Portugal
Featured: move-in ready with storage hall/ workshop space
Salaborda Nova, Central Portugal · €114,000 (~$123,120)
This is the splurge of the week, and it is the one you could actually move into. It is a two-part property in a small farming village in central Portugal, and the house is move-in ready, which in this newsletter means it has a roof that works, a functioning kitchen, and a functioning bathroom. The land is already working for you, with mature, producing fruit and nut trees, olives, and grapes. There is also a big storage hall, which could keep your produce or become a workshop or a studio. Honestly probably shouldn’t be posting it because we kind of want it for ourselves.
Japan
Featured: a little coastal house in Kochi that already did the scary part
Susaki, Kochi, Japan · ¥3,500,000 (~$23,000)
Okay, let's talk about this one. Susaki is a small city on the Pacific coast of Kochi, which is the least crowded corner of Japan's least crowded big island. The municipal government here will help pay you to renovate an empty house, because a house with a person in it is cheaper for the town than a house slowly falling down.
The house is 264 square meters of single-story wood on a 264-square-meter lot, three rooms plus a dining-kitchen, and you can move in immediately. It has a garden, a parking spot, and a train station two minutes away by car. In summer you can see the fireworks over Tosa Bay from the property.
Here is the part that makes this one special. Most houses at this price come with a giant invisible asterisk: they have not had their earthquake retrofit, and that retrofit is expensive. This one already did it. The seismic diagnosis and the renovation are both done. That matters a lot here, because the southern coast of Shikoku sits in the projected zone for the next big Nankai Trough quake, so the costly, non-negotiable job is already checked off.
The catch is the weather. Only amphibious types need apply. Kochi is the wettest prefecture in Japan, with heavy rains June through September and typhoon season July through October. The capital, Kochi city, is an hour east and very manageable, known for its Edo period castle, its historic Sunday street market, and its bonito (katsuo).